


For Luck

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff, I'm just ignoring the heck out of the series ending fight me, Kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 07:46:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14711993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: Four short "kissing" prompts between Doug and Hera, a ship in which only half the participants actually have lips.





	For Luck

**Author's Note:**

> Quick prompt fill because I havn't written in approximately fifty years. These formed a (very) loose narrative when I wrote them, so I decided to put them up as such.

 

**A kiss…**

> _**…where it doesn’t hurts** _

Eiffel was on night surveillance.  Normally this was something he would grouse about, but with Hera newly back online (alive, she was _alive_ ), and both him and Minkowski just relieved not to be woken every three minutes by a new alarm, he found he didn’t have the heart to bother.  Even when Hera had stated that there was no point in Eiffel staying up, she could monitor the situation just fine on her own, he hadn’t jumped on that free ticket to sleep; instead he had shrugged, and gone with the commander’s request.  Hera was still working on getting all of her systems back online and functional again, and there was currently something… not doing that.  There had been a more technical explanation, but what Eiffel had gotten from it was that something wasn’t meshing properly.  It meant frequent sounds of grinding metal and shrieking circuits – the lights were on the fritz, and Hera… well, she was having a night of it.

Nothing to do but wait it out, she had said.  And Minkowski had made it clear that until the issue fell back into realignment, someone else should be awake to make sure it didn’t get worse.  And since Minkowski had already been up for almost twenty four hours clearing out engineering, that left one drowsy communications officer to pick up the slack.

And so Eiffel found himself sitting in the dark, alone, in front of a control panel that was producing a lot of unintelligible beeping and flashing at random intervals.

Well, not completely alone.

“That one _really_ sounded like it hurt,” said Eiffel, a little helplessly.  God, he didn’t know the first thing about how this stupid ship worked, never mind the super advanced sentient computer that ran everything.  That ignorance, the fact that Hera would still be dead without Hilbert’s _benevolence_ still stung.

“It doesn’t _h-hurt_ , Officer Eiffel.  I can’t feel p-pain,” said Hera.  Her words were clipped, curt, like she was reciting them.  In a sense she was, he supposed.  She’d said something similar every time Eiffel had made a face as the systems shrieked in duress, and Hera’s voice inevitably broke in what, to a human, would be pain.  It sure sounded like pain, no matter what Hera said.

“Oh.  Yeah, right, gotcha.  Good,” he said, woodenly.  Maybe it really didn’t hurt.  Wouldn’t that be lucky for her.

Eiffel floated silently, staring at the panel Minkowski had left him in front of with unblinking eyes.  The shift he was currently pulling wasn’t half as exhausting or stressful as things had been before they’d gotten Hera up and running again, so that didn’t really explain why it felt so much worse.  Even as his eyes got heavy and he could feel himself beginning to nod off, he resisted the temptation.

The lights on the board flickered, and some electronic-sounding chirped and Eiffel didn’t have the slightest idea what any of it meant.

Hera sighed.  “You don’t _need_ to st-ay here, Eiffel.  I can keep an eye over the systems just fine on my o-own.  I’ll be sure to inform the commander if there is anything that I… c-can’t handle.”

Eiffel opened his mouth, and closed it.  Words sat on his tongue, but he couldn’t make sense of them enough to explain it.  How he couldn’t sleep even if he had wanted to right now.  How he would miss her.  How he _had_ missed her.  How he remembered when Anne had gotten an ear infection and he had sat up next to her crib at Kate’s place.  She’d explained that Anne was on antibiotics, that it was pretty common for young children to get ear infections, that there wasn’t anything for him to do, but he’d sat up anyway.  Held his daughter, kissed her aching head, promised it would be okay even though he could do no such thing and she couldn’t understand him regardless.  Ostensibly it was so that Kate wouldn’t need to get up every time Anne fussed, but watching his baby crying and in pain, he found himself thinking about everything that could happen if he went home and went to sleep.  Things that wouldn’t happen, sure, but things that _could_.  Wasn’t there that whole thing in science about how observing something changes it?  Quantum, or something?  He would have to ask Hilbert.  He wouldn’t, of course, but all these thoughts bobbed for space in his tired mind as the night wore on and the lights blink and Hera experienced not-pain from something that Hilbert had torn apart and not put back properly.

He didn’t know how to possibly say any of this though.

“Eiffe- _aah!_ ”  The gasp was accompanied by a sharp, grinding noise.

There was nothing to do but wait for the system to reset itself.  That’s what Hilbert had said to Minkowski.  That’s what Minkowski had said to Eiffel.  That was what Hera had said to all of them.

Eiffel leaned forward and pressed a kiss against the control panel with its frantically flickering lights.  Nothing else would work so he may as well do what had been not-working for centuries.

-

> _**…to pretend** _

It had been a rare, boring morning, which meant Eiffel was revelling in his first down time in what felt like an eternity.  He had chosen to celebrate it by playing cultural reference trivia off with Hera, who’s bizarre collection of data made for interesting, if strange and disconnected, competition.  Hera was the only one willing to indulge him in this, and honestly there was no one else he felt like talking to on his time off.  He saw more than enough of his dear crewmates the rest of the time.

In any case, the game hadn’t lasted long, before things had quietly slid into reminiscence.

And which had then taken the sharp, unexpected detour, into a fight.

Eiffel was still trying to figure that one out.

“You ca-an’t just talk ab-out how much you like s-spending time with m-me and then immediately start talking about Ear-rth again!  I’ll never get to see those things, D-Doug.  That isn’t my home, there’s n-nothing for me there!  Even if you d-do figure out how to get out of here, we’re never going to just… go s-see a movie, or eat at a restaurant together.  That’s not how this w-works!”

“Well why not?  Who says it can’t?  Goddard?  Fuck them!”

“I’m t-telling you i-it c-ca-can’t!  M-my brain is the s-size of a truck!  How do you think I’m g-going to walk around a town?  If I g-go back there, I’ll be stored in a _warehouse_!”

“I wouldn’t let that happen!”

“You couldn’t stop it!”

Eiffel had no idea how things had derailed this badly.  He’d just wanted to talk about something that was _nice_ and not related to the constant near-death experience that was their life!  Was that too much to ask?  Did Goddard have to ruin everything?  He didn’t know what to say or do, he just felt angry and stupid, with emotions he didn’t have a name for choking him.  This was important!  _She_ was important!  Why couldn’t she understand that?  No he couldn’t stop talking about it because that meant one of these two very important things would be gone forever, and he couldn’t bear that.

He needed her to know this.  So, with emotions and desperation taking control his thought process, he shoved himself forward instead, until he bumped up against one of the ship’s walls.  Looping his hands into one of the holds, he brought his face forward and pressed his lips against it.

The metal was hard and unforgiving.  He tried not to think about the taste of metal, or the chill that pressed back against his lips.  Instead he just pushed harder, trying to force all the feelings out and directly into Hera’s mainframe.

“What are you _doing_?” demanded Hera.

Eiffel felt dumb.  Somehow emotions always made him dumb.  He was going to own these ones though, so he let his head thunk against the wall.  “Kissing you.”  It sounded sullen and childish to his own ears.

“ _What_?” said Hera, her voice glitching so badly over the word it was almost incomprehensible.  It may have been, back when Eiffel was new the ship; now Hera’s vocal quirks were a part of every day life, a part of Hera.

“I just.  I want to do all that stuff with you when we get back, and I’m not just gonna let Goddard get their fingers into your brain again.  When we leave, we’re all leaving.  Okay?  And I thought, hey, I wouldn’t mind kissing you when we get back either, but figured I could do that now too, so why wait, right?”

“I d-on’t h-have lips, for o-one,” said Hera.  Her voice was as chilled as the metal.

Eiffel couldn’t hold back his frustration.  “Can’t we just pretend?” he said.

“Pretend what, Doug?  That I’m human?  I’m not.”

“That’s not what I’m saying!”

“That’s what it sounds like.”

“You know what,” said Doug, shoving himself away from the wall, “forget it.  Just forget all of this, alright?  It was dumb.”

The emotions still sat heavy and aching in his chest though.  He wondered if this was a pain Hera was also free from.

-

> _**…where it does hurt** _

“Mother _fucker_.”

“Officer Eiffel?  Are you okay?”

Eiffel swore up and down his repertoire of curses as he clung to his arm, muscles jumping and trembling as pain jumped up and down his nerves.

“ _Fuck_.”

“Doug?  Should I call Commander Minkowski?  Did something happen?”

Eiffel swallowed down the pained profanity that was trying to escape and spoke instead through gritted teeth.  “It’s fine Hera.  Just bumped that _stupid_ pipe…”  A pipe that carried super-heated water through the system’s core, and had plenty of warnings around it.  It wouldn’t be the first time, and it was insulated well enough that most of the time a slip-up didn’t result in anything more than a mild burn and a good wake-up call.  But every nerve in Eiffel’s body had been on a hair trigger since his little road trip into deep space.  Apparently prescribing yourself daily hypothermia ad infinitum was bad for your nerves or something.  Go figure.  And while his body seemed to be slowly fixing itself (hair growing back in sad, fuzzy clumps, nails slowly appearing to cover tender nailbeds, all under the fascinated, giddy eyes of Doctor Hilbert) the sensitiveness of his skin was slow to return to its normal threshold.  It wasn’t as bad as it had been back in the Urania, on the trip back to the Hephaestus, when even clothes had felt like sandpaper, but it wasn’t great.  Mostly now it was just sudden temperature changes that did it.  Like bumping into the fucking jacuzzi pipe.

Hera, of course, knew all this – Eiffel had no doubt she kept a particularly close eye on him whenever he was alone with Hilbert – so he didn’t bother to explain beyond: “It’s just, you know, _this_.”

“Oh, right.”

“Yeah.”

Eiffel was about to push off, and float his way back out of the hazards of the lower decks, when there was a hiss and one of the little hatches along the walls open.  It was a little square thing that held one of the system’s cooling rods – they were made to open and extend outward, exposing a long cooling rod when something was overheating and needing a quick release.  This one opened and thumped gently against his arm.  The metal was mild and cool, and it almost felt soothing on the hot, tender skin, before it quickly retracted back into the wall.

“Uh, Hera?  What was that?”

“N-nothing, Officer Ei-ffel.  I was just t-trying som-mething.  Someth-thing… pretend.”

“O…kay?  Did it work?” he asked, rubbing at spot the cooling rod had touched.

“I’m n-not sure.  Maybe.”

-

> _**…for luck** _

“Are we ready yet?”

“Give us a _moment_ , Eiffel.  We trying not to completely fuck this up, okay?” snapped Lovelace.  “We’re not exactly qualified for this.”

“I’m ready to begin the start up sequence if you are,” said Minkowski.  “I don’t see how this can get much more secure.”

“I mean, we only risk frying everything that makes her _her_ because we rushed things, but sure, why not, let’s go,” Lovelace grumbled, shoving aside the pile of wires she’d been triple checking.

The Minkowski-Koudelka household was currently turned upside down.  It had been ever since Minkowksi had staggered home, tired, weak, and trailing a party of impromptu houseguests to surprise her husband with her unexpected resurrection from supposed death.  Lately though it had only gotten worse, as in fits and starts they had started on The Upgrades.

“You’ve always said it would be neat to have a smart house,” Minkowski had told her husband.  It had been partially joking, partially pleading – a desperate bid for him to understand, despite him only learning scattered bits and pieces of a long, traumatic, and impossible story.

“I’m not sure this is what I meant,” he had laughed, but had gone that same day to pick up the grounding cables Lovelace had requested.

Dominik was a good guy, Eiffel had decided, when he had time to think about anything that wasn’t computer science so far beyond his realm of understanding it made him want to cry some days.

Today was the day though.  Now was the minute.  Everything was about to pay off.

“Alright, ready to rock and roll then kiddies?” called Lovelace.

“Wait!” Eiffel shouted, and darted towards the basement.

“Wait for what?  Eiffel!” Minkowski called after him but he didn’t stop, hopping the last couple steps and skidding into the renovated cellar.

The room had been made secure, waterproof, and most importantly: airconditioned.  Because it was now the bedroom of the Hephaestus’ biggest resident.  The massive hard-drives that theoretically held all of Hera sat quietly in there.  It held her as long as they hadn’t screwed anything up, as long as everything had turned out perfect.

It had to have turned out.  They had worked hard and they had worked smart.  They had double, triple, quadruple checked everything.  But just in case, just in case…

Eiffel pressed a quick kiss to the side of the metal casing.

“For luck,” he told her.

“ _Eiffel!_ ” called the voice from upstairs.

“Coming!  See you soon, babe,” he said, before turning and jogging back up the stairs.

It was time.  And he already had a movie line-up chosen for them.


End file.
